Web tutorials: bibliographic instruction in a new medium

Libraries are adding electronic resources of all kinds at an increasing pace to provide service to users outside the library and around the world. To meet this new demand, libraries are turning more and more to the use of online tutorials as a valuable means of providing instruction on how to access and use important resources. This article describes the Health Sciences Library and Biocommunications Center's work and experiences while creating tutorials, the ideas used, and ways the work was evaluated.     

Variables in Eliciting Writing Samples

What is the impact on students' writing samples of such factors as prompt features, prewriting activities, time limits, and examiner practices? How can these variables be systematically reported?     

The hospital library and the enterprise portal

At Exempla Healthcare, the medical librarians and the e-Business staff are creating an enterprise information portal where medical reference is targeted, easily accessible, and supported by the medical librarians. A team approach has been essential. The e-Business department has worked for nine months coordinating technical challenges required to support personalization, targeted communications, and a single access point for clinical patient data. Exempla medical librarians have been involved in the definition and design of information access needs from the very beginning. The Clinicians Portal was the first developed, with other customizations to follow. Many challenges remain, but by definition, a portal is designed to be flexible and adapt to the changing needs of the enterprise it supports.     

‘Young Europeans’: Widening horizons for educare workers

The development of a 30‐hour module for inclusion in professional development programmes for Educare workers is described. The module was composed of contributions from seven EU countries. The contents of each session and the responses of a pilot group of students to it are analysed and the implications for future work discussed. It is concluded that the module proved an effective way of encouraging students to reflect on the dilemmas implicit in all early years work and to be open to a far wider range of possible philosophies and practices.     

The university's statement of goals

The need for universities and colleges to clarify their goals is discussed in light of current financial constraint. Reasons are provided supporting goal-definition including management techniques borrowed from the business world. Goal formulation strategies and techniques of the Institutional Goals Inventory (IGI) and the Delphi technique are addressed with specific attention paid to the application of the IGI at the University of Ottawa.     

Training phonological awareness: A study with inner-city kindergarten children

A small-scale, longitudinal, phonological awareness training study with inner-city kindergarten children was conducted in four classrooms. The central goals of the study were the creation and evaluation of a phonological awareness training program and a preliminary look at the consequence of that training on basic phonological processes. Assessment of phonological awareness and basic phonological processes was carried out in the fall of the kindergarten year, and again in the spring following an 18 week training program which incorporated both auditory and articulatory techniques for fostering metaphonological development. Follow-up evaluation of promotion to first grade and of reading achievement took place a year later. The children in the two experimental classes receiving training had significantly greater gains in phonological awareness at the end of kindergarten, were significantly more likely to be promoted to first grade rather than to pre-one, and had a trend toward better reading skills in first grade than did the smaller group of children promoted to first grade from the control classes. In addition, there were some indications that development of phonological awareness was accompanied by changes in the underlying phonological system as well. Here we focus on the rationale and implementation of our training program and discuss the implications of the findings for a potential large-scale study.